{"id":1682,"date":"2008-05-18T10:22:03","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T14:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=1682"},"modified":"2008-05-18T10:54:26","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T14:54:26","slug":"democrats-in-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=1682","title":{"rendered":"Democrats in the South"},"content":{"rendered":"

Democrats, pleased that their plan to run as Republicans worked so well for them in the South in the 2006 midterms, are planning to repeat that success in this year’s election.(Washington Times<\/a> link)<\/p>\n

While even the most optimistic Democrats aren’t predicting a return to the Dixiecrat era, when Southerners would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than a Republican, the party is having more success in recruiting politically attractive candidates who reflect the political culture of their districts.<\/p>\n

“This is really not about ideology. It’s about power,” said Leon Panetta, a one-time chief of staff to President Clinton who served as a Democratic congressman from California from 1977 to 1993.<\/p>\n

“Republicans as well as Democrats look for candidates who best appeal to their districts that they’re running in,” he said. “What you want are candidates who have the best chance of winning, not losing, and it just seems to me that’s pretty pragmatic on the part of the people who run the [Democratic] campaign committee, and that’s what’s paying off for them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So basically, what Panetta is admitting is that the national Democrats have fooled southern voters into voting for more conservative candidates who are powerless to change the direction of the party. They’re voting for conservative candidates, but they get the legislation of Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers and Maxine Waters.<\/p>\n

Of course, the Democrat leadership won’t admit it publicly;<\/p>\n

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland also downplayed the political differences between his new Southern colleagues and the rest of the Democratic Caucus, saying they all share the party’s concern over fiscal responsibility and balancing the federal budget.<\/p>\n

“Childers ran on kitchen-table issues, on pocketbook issues for people in the 1st Congressional District of Mississippi,” he said. “I will tell you that every member of the Democratic Caucus essentially believes those are the issues which are our issues.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, that’s why the Democrats have given us the marriage penalty tax and more recently changed George Bush’s tax rebate to tax payers to include Americans who don’t pay taxes while reducing tax rebates to the middle class workers who shoulder the tax burden.<\/p>\n

Although southern voters are voting for candidates who seem to reflect their own values, that’s not what they’re getting from Congress. Southern conservative congress members’ votes are diluted by the west coast and northeast liberals. Of course, that might be why Congress’ popularity has fallen to historic lows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democrats, pleased that their plan to run as Republicans worked so well for them in the … Democrats in the South<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}